


parthenogenesis

by cosmogyral



Category: The Girl Who Owned A City - O. T. Nelson
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Apocalypse, Canon Compliant, Gen, Medical, Minor Character Death, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Glenbard's doctor is learning as fast as she can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	parthenogenesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TL](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=TL), [TLvop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TLvop/gifts).



> Thanks to my betas, Hsifeng and thingswithwings. Thanks also to [this remarkable post](http://recessional.dreamwidth.org/41902.html). Most biology quotes from the Pearson textbook used at Glenbard West, except for the ones I made up. And a very happy Yuletide to my recipient, who I hope enjoys this as much as I did writing it.

> "Here is our hospital," Jill said. "Missy and Katy will be my nurses. Be sure to come to me if you have even the tiniest pain. We have lots of medicine and I'm studying hard about first aid and those things. I will become a real doctor as fast as I can."

A **pathogen** is a disease-causing agent. A **disease** is any change, other than an injury, that disrupts the normal functions of the body. Jill learns phrases she's not sure about, like "herd immunity" and "drug resistant." She lets viruses go and learns the difference between eubacteria and archaebacteria. She studies the table, _diseases caused by bacteria_, and is baffled to see "tooth decay." She always thought sugar got into teeth in some unspecified way, and she isn't sure about her toothbrush for a week.

She puts in a work order for an airtight room, and they modify one of the classrooms. It'll hurt them for space, but it's better than the alternative. They have six bottles of antibiotics and she counts them again and again, never quite sure. Sometimes she wakes from nightmares where she opens a bottle and out spill a hundred rolypolies, uncurling and waving their antenna in her direction. Then she goes down the hospital and counts the bottles again before going into her quarantine and cleaning the floor, checking the seal on what used to be windows.

The **plague** is dead.

A **vaccine** is a preparation of killed or weakened pathogens. The required vaccinations for the high school were: diptheria, polio, hepatitis B, measles mumps rubella, and Mantoux skin test. She doesn't know what that last one is. The dictionary says it has to do with tubercules, which she guesses has to do with tuberculosis, but no one's ever gotten tuberculosis that she knows about. Polio is Franklin Roosevelt, but it's a virus. Measles is a virus too and hepatitis B is a sexually-transmitted disease, she thinks, which makes her laugh, ashamed, and cover her mouth. Diptheria is a bacteria, a rhyme she appreciates. She could do something with diptheria. But diptheria's dead, or it is until they get the airplanes running.

"Whooping cough," Craig suggests, when she visits him. "I had it when I was just a kid. It's no fun. It's a bacteria for sure, I remember the pills I had to take." He grins at her. "It tasted terrible. Can you fix _that_?"

"Oh, Craig." She tucks her legs under herself. "I can't fix anything."

He serves her a plate of apples and a glass of milk, and she smiles up at him. "You can't figure out how to cook the eggs, can you."

"It can't be that hard," he protests. "Erika can do it. I just need practice."

"I'll bring you a cookbook," she promises, and takes a piece of apple. "Is it hard, milking?"

It turns out milking makes setting a broken bone look like a day on the beach. She takes home a bushel of their apples and a handful of peas. She barters them for the entire first litter of Jordan Jacobs' pet rats, and delegates their rearing to a ten year old assistant nurse named Harrison, who apparently had a rat once and remembers how to change their cage. They don't name the rats and they keep them in a corner, which does not keep her from growing attached.

It's Lisa who suggests the bread mold, having found a poster in one of the classrooms that has an astounding amount of information mixed in with jokes about time machines. The poster says Jill can culture viruses and she stares at it, not sure if she can trust anything that helpful, but that's a picture of penicillin, a _picture_, and _that_ means she has to get the microscopes working before the bread molds, and she leaves out slice after slice of Wonder Bread on the counter, watching them narrowly for a shade of blue. They settle on a tea candle put where the lightbulb ought to be, and it's not very bright but she places a slide over it from one of the bio classrooms and catches her breath as the leaf cells spring into brilliant, beautiful relief.

In the sixth month the flu hits. She puts everyone with so much as a cough in quarantine, and ignores their arguments as she feeds them chicken soup and tea. Lisa, of course, is one of the first, and protests the whole time she's in there that she's indispensable. Jill mostly ignores her. She remembers her fantasy novels and boils willow bark, tries it on the rats who don't die, feeds it to her patients. Some of their fevers go down. There are fifteen of them, then twenty, but it never gets out of hand, and she thinks it's all right, it's going to be all right, it's just the flu, until a three year old's fever goes up, and up, and up. She stays up with him, getting water down him, then Gatorade when Harrison remembers electrolytes, and she gives him real aspirin and tells him not to die and the kid dies anyway.

Lisa sits up in her bed, watching them. Her eyes are dark. "I'm sorry."

"You didn't kill him," Jill says, and wraps her arms around her knees and cries until she falls asleep.

Everyone else lives.

**Penicillin** is so beautiful when she sees it she thinks she might die. A **mortar and pestle** is a tool she never thought she'd use as she grinds the bread down small, smaller, into a sticky pulp that's tinged blue all over. She feeds it to the rats, and the rats don't die. She is astonished by how often the rats don't die. She's a little worried they've gotten some extra hardy rats. Maybe they're the kid rats who survived the plague, maybe one of them stays up all night in a corner of the cage and pretends she owns the whole cage and is renting it to the other rats. She has identified which rat she thinks it would be and she tells it, feeling very blasphemous, that the difference between being queen of Glenbard and owner of Glenbard is that only one of them gets to wear a crown, and you'd think Lisa would want the crown anyway.

A **hormone** is a substance produced in one part of an organism that affects another part of the same organism. **Puberty** is a period of rapid growth and sexual maturation during which the reproductive system becomes fully functional. It's also all Jill can think about. They find a nearly infinite supply of tampons, and the boys don't play the teenager in the way she'd expected them to, blushing and emotional but not pointlessly immature, which is all good, except they're aging and figuring things out and if they're bleeding, they can have babies, babies they'll have to raise. Babies who'll grow up on the bedtime story of the brave little prince and kids who'll go and join the Chicago army. She's getting ahead of herself.

The **plague** is--

The **plague**\--

After she's done teaching a health class one day in their second year, she sits in the back of the room and watches Missy lead history. Missy insisted. It's why she's not working in the hospital anymore, and is instead pretty much living in the library. Jill comes home late at night sometimes to see her in a little puddle of candlelight, reading one more book. Missy sounds confident and loud and enthusiastic and even the five year olds in the front of the room are paying attention. "Once upon a time," she says, "there was a man named Thomas Jefferson. And he had an idea. It was a pretty good idea. He wanted there to be a place where everyone owned their own things, and the King couldn't take them away from you."

Jill tunes out when she reaches the Declaration of Independence. She's thinking of how Missy's going to teach this story. _Once upon a time, there were no more parents or teachers or aunts or grandparents or presidents or bosses--_

"--and they fought the British by hiding in the woods and dressing up as Indians, with feathers in their hair sticking up like this--"

_\--just a bunch of students trying to take care of other students, and we became citizens of Glenbard--_

"--and they set off a million fireworks and had hot dogs to celebrate the end of the long war--"

_\--and we're all that's left of the world._

Missy's sitting next to her, she realizes, and she turns and smiles. "Jill," Missy says, "are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Jill says. She's telling the truth.

She's probably never going to know what the plague was. She's probably never going to make a vaccine that works, or listen to Lisa's boomboxes on generators, or eat food that Craig cooked himself. The kids in the front row are never going to actually know anything about the Revolutionary War. She's never going to know whether or not that one rat really thinks it owns the world, either.

She's okay with that.

On their second anniversary, Jill shows people around her hospital. Craig's come for the party. He hands Jill a bushel of apples. "Not that I'm trying to keep the doctor away," he says. "But, you know."

A **doctor** is someone who fights diseases, Jill thinks, her hands closing around the edge of the basket. She smiles up at Craig. "I know," she says. "Let me show you what I'm working on."


End file.
